Tariq Mustafa's Reviews > Thinking, Fast and Slow

Great book. Gets a bit academic and philosophical towards the penultimate sections but otherwise wonderful addition to vocabulary and understanding. Made me ashamed of a lot of my previous ways of thinking and false self confidence.

My notebook page for this book reads like the following:

#Concept of Priming and its effects on people
#Conginitive Ease (ease of recalling) decides a lot more than it deserves to
#Mind creates coherent stories just for the heck of coherence, actual situations are different often
#The Halo effect gets people thinking about stuff because of the first impressions, must be nullified
#Judgement errors (Mental Shotgun)
#Substitution is the most common error in answering questions, avoid
#The law of small numbers advises us to always consider a larger pool of stats for key decisions
#The anchoring effect is also great on System 1
#Availability of information results in biased decisions
#Availability cascades created by media further distorts the choices
#Representative-ness errors are common, people take one thing to represent another (stereo typing)
#Conjunction fallacy is common despite logically being less probable
#Overlooking statistics is common even in statistician
#Overlooking luck is common as people engaged in self-constructed stories; Hitler could have been a woman at birth (50% chance)
#Intuitive predictions are common and are mostly wrong, simple algorithms could do better instead
#Hindsight illusions states that we think we knew something that has happened as likely to happen when we really did not know the future at that time; hence the same remains true for present moment wrt future prediction
#Illusion of validity comes subjective experience of confidence being developed by System1; the antidote is objective facts
#You can only trust intuitive experts when a) environment is regular and predictable and b) prolong practice of predictor is valid
#Planning fallacy is common and people must invite outsiders for a 3rd party review of planning estimates
#Bernoulli Theory of utility is wrong because it lacks the mention of reference point
#Theory induced blindness
#Prospect Theory (of Daniel Kahneman) value of money is not absolute but it is a subjective experience b) diminished sensitivity to changes in wealth and c) we all loath to loose money
#Loss aversion is a strong force in decisions, even larger than it deserves
#Endowment effect comes into play once we own something for some time, not before that
#Possibility Effect
#Certainity Effect
#Overestimating rare events
#Thinking narrowly often misleads us to averse risks that could be positive
#Disposition effect
#Sunk Cost fallacy; taught in business school still not yet widely learnt
#Fear of regret is great
#Choice reversals is common, suggesting that humans are different from rational econs
#We often ignore joint evaluation which are better than single evaluations
#We often ignore framing and its effects
#There are two selves - remembering self and experiencing self
#Peak End rule states that how something ends marks its rating in the remembering domain
#Duration neglect states that states timing and durations matter much less than they should
#Narrative wholeness